It’s worse then you think. As a Australian citizen you are required to comply with any order which includes leaking code and introducing back doors. Failure to comply or notifying your employer about the request will result in federal charges with a sentence between 20 to 60 years in prison. The legislation that contains this was passed almost a year ago.
Recently there’s been a wave of mass disruptions and data theft in Australia including most of our ports halting operations for a day and one of our largest phone and internet service providers being compromised where millions of peoples personal information like driver licences and passports being leaked.
That’s a really fucking stupid law. Do we need to worry about Australia becoming fascist?
Too late. Already is.
That’s a joke right? It has been for a very long time.
How does that even work? When you push code for a back door it’s going to still go through a code review so it’s not exactly going to be secret, right?
Yep and then you get fired but atleast you won’t go to jail
My point is that any dev team worth anything has it set up so that it isn’t possible to merge changes into master unless someone else approves. So it’s more like it isn’t possible in most cases, not “you should do the right thing”.
20year minimum, really? Isnt that also for murder?
I recently switched my email from gmail to proton mail, because fuck google’s… well… everything. Glad to hear that Proton Mail keeps fighting for privacy!
I changed back when google got rid of the free “mail for your domain” and frankly its been a great thing for me. They keep announcing new things that replacing my existing apps.
They have a password manager now that I use. They are finally adding actual fuction to their online drive storage so I can sync files and backup photos.
Its been well worth the price for me. If only they had an office suite lol
I really wish their password manager used a serif font, though. That’s pretty unacceptable if you’re generating secure passwords.
Could you explain why them not using a serif font is bad?
Generally speaking, serif fonts make it easier to distinguish between visually similar characters like o, O, and 0 or 1, I, and l.
Yeah that’s true, but I can’t see why distinguishing is required of a human. I use my password manager to generate and input passwords for me. I don’t even know any of them.
It’s not uncommon for the password manager to not be on the same system as where the password is being entered - hence a human needs to type. For example: consumer electronics with their own dinky little screens. Smart TVs/game systems and servers where remote access is not possible (or copy/paste does not work by design).
Or if you have to do business with a dinosaur company that won’t let you paste in the PW field.
Please don’t use serif fonts for UI elements. Imagine the buttons on your file manager being Times New Roman. (eww.) I think what you’re looking for is a monospaced font that’s designed to distinguish O/0, I/1/l, etc.
Plug for one of my favorite fonts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
The only thing I haven’t found a good replacement for was how G Drive also handles Office style documents. I make use of that a lot, especially from my phone. But I agree, Proton Mail hasn’t been painful one bit.
Seriously? My workplace uses google drive, and many documents are made with word. … A very common problem is that sometimes someone opens a word doc from the web interface of google drive - which automatically can conveniently opens it with google docs, which totally screws up the formatting and then autosaves it.
(I hate google, and I resent that even after I’ve removed all aspects of it from my home & personal usage, I still have to use it at work.)
I wish I could integrate it with like onlyoffice or something like that. Would be perfect.
For now I have to be happy with saving to my documents folder and knowing its backed up.
Dude, that email alias feature is the best thing about their password app! I’ve started using it all the time for services, new and old. Will make it easy as hell to find those selling my info.
Yeah the email alias rock. Especially when I was car shopping recently.
Want my email? Sure, here you go. SPAM? BEGONE, FOREVER BEGONE!
Proton’s feature set is very limited and kind of all over the place depending on platform, and development is incredibly slow, especially for Linux, but I do believe they’re committed to privacy and they do have a whole suite of products now under a single, very reasonably-priced subscription.
It’s only slow for Linux because they can’t find Linux devs. If you know any, tell them to apply.
I dont believe that for a second. It’s slow because, like most things Linux, almost nobody used it.
However, it is undoubtedly the most private and secure desktop OS.
I use the web mail client and thunderbird client and it works fine. Protonvpn works fine in arch linux, there’s gui and cli, I prefer cli. Drive isn’t on linux yet but web client works wonderfully fast.
What part of Proton’s feature set is limited and compared to what other service? You can do a whole lot more with proton than with Gmail for example.
I mean…that’s a long list, my guy.
Gmail client, no, but I have my (work) Gmail connected to Shortwave, which honestly is a fucking Godsend for all the people who insist on continuing to use email. It just makes it so much easier to organize everything.
You can’t do the same thing with Proton (for good reason) but there’s no reason they can’t incorporate those features.
Couldn’t forward emails until about a month ago.
Their drive app backs up only the computer it’s on and other computers cant access that backup. It’s like a sectioned off part. Or I can upload files that any of my devices can access.
Their calendar has some problems with compatibility of run into and it’s things that the person on either side can’t change. Not world ending but it’s really annoying.
They literally just added the ability to automatically add holidays to the calendar. And of course I had set it up about a month prior so I manually entered everything.
The proton drive app for your phone doesn’t automatically back up anything.
I’m not shitting on proton because I’m an active proton unlimited subscriber and I use a bunch of their services, but I also recognize the flaws and how it’s not as seamless as Google yet, which I don’t expect it to be.
I also wish they had some better Linux support in preaching to the choir with that.
Love their vpn and the netshield features. Email works great and I love knowing I can read an email and automatically have trackers blocked. Aliases are great but I use their simple login site free with my proton subscription too. So my point is I like them lots, but it’s not a complete Google replacement yet.
Couldn’t forward emails until about a month ago.
wow, that in particular seems like a minimum viable product feature
Oh ok I was just referring to the email part. You are right that their non-email offerings do leave a lot to be desired. I’ve found that downloading files from Proton Drive as small as 3GB is almost impossible, because their download rate is atrocious and on iOS if you don’t keep the screen active during the download it’ll just stop with no way to resume later.
To everyone saying they’ve changed to protonmail, check out https://simplelogin.io/ , owned by proton and free for all paying proton members. Unlimited email aliases so you can have a unique email per service. The apps also on fdroid.
Why would I switch from Firefox relay that gives unlimited aliases at 1/4 of the price?
You dont have to switch but if someone is paying for Proton than they can utilize it for no extra charge
Ooh so if you are already a Proton Other Things subscriber you get the unlimited alias version for free? Because that’s an excellent reason.
They should make that more clear in the pricing page.
Thanks!
Yeah I wish they advertised that because it’s an excellent deal. I don’t know if the free Simplelogin Premium applies to all levels of subscription plans but Unlimited for sure has it. Been using it and it’s amazing, it allows you to add PGP encryption through protonmail and simplelogin.
I didn’t try Proton’s solution, but free Relay was blocked at some services I tried to use it. It was so weirdly specific since no one really knows about them, so I guess some web admins has enough time on their hands to create a whitelist of all mail services they support, and moz.com wasn’t there.
There are github repositories where people curate a list of domains providing temporary emails or email aliases and admins can just point to the maintained list to block.
In the ~20 I’ve created so far I’ve had 2 services that wouldn’t accept simple login. For those I’ve used proton mail’s built in email alias service where you get 15 aliases with their proper domain.
I’m just finishing up that transition myself and glad to hear I made a good choice!
Same, using Proton mail and I am now blissfully Google free. Something else I found the holidays good for is finding out all the old accounts I have floating out there from sites that I interacted with over the years so I can cancel them or change the email if i decide to keep them. But, no more Google! Next on my list is Amazon.
I’m in the (gradual) process of switching all my stuff from Gmail and Google to Proton mail. I really like the mail client and Proton Drive works better on my computers than Google Drive did, but Proton Drive doesn’t back up my phone yet and I wish they had an office suite like Google does. I don’t put anything important or private on Google docs, but it’s useful to be able to access my textbook notes from any of my computers. I haven’t used the password manager because I’m using Bitwarden, which I really like.
They just released photo backups on android
I want Proton Drive support on Linux.
It’s currently completely useless to me, unfortunately.
Same and windows arm too
I missed that update! This is great news!
In the same boat. I currently just forward everything from gmail to ProtonMail and am gradually changing my contact email one at a time. It dawned on me that I receive mails from services I don’t give a damn about, so maybe I should not change those.
Protonmail isn’t great, their deliberately misleading about the encryption. Many consider protonmail to be a honeypot.
Do you have anymore background on that?
He wrote their instead of they’re, make your judgement.
Well god damn it! Did you have any links to articles about it? Also what would you view to be better then proton.me?
The state (i.e. a group of people that claims only they can legally use violence in a given geographic region) is a tool used by the psychopathic hoarder class – it’s purpose is to steal from us (our labor and resources that belong to us all) in relative safety (i.e. protected by state enforcement/police).
Our societal “advancement” can largely be understood in terms of this psychopathic hoarder class become more efficient and effective. Look at amazon.com, is that an advancement over stores or a more efficient way to exploit resources and people and effectively expedite the planet’s destruction?
We need a robust democracy with strong regulation, not a lack of structure in our society.
This. Anarchism is not the way, democratic control is.
Structurelessness only leads to tyranny of another kind. Read Jo Freeman’s thoughts on this concept:
Anarchism means people can protect themselves and their community without a state interfering. This means if you don’t protect yourself you pay consequences. Those that would become tyrannical don’t appear fully formed.
A functional anarchist society needs cultural mechanisms, i.e. tolerance of self defense at all levels, these should be able to prevent psychopaths from growing old. But I’m limited in what I can write here.
Democracy tends toward corruption as any concentration of power will.
If a corporation won’t ruin a good thing, you leave it to government to get the job done.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.
But privacy and security groups argue the draft standards, as written, could allow the eSafety commissioner to force companies to compromise encryption to comply.
Andy Yen, the founder and chief executive of Proton, told Guardian Australia the proposed standards “would force online services, no matter whether they are end-to-end encrypted or not, to access, collect, and read their users’ private conversations”.
“These proposals could not only force companies to bypass their own encryption, but could put businesses and citizens at risk while doing little to protect people from the online harms they are intended to address,” he said.
A spokesperson for the eSafety commissioner said Inman Grant welcomed feedback on the draft standards – including on the technical feasibility exception.
“Having mandatory and enforceable codes in place, which put the onus back on industry to take meaningful action against the worst-of-the-worst content appearing on their products and services, is a tremendously important online safety milestone,” Inman Grant said.
The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.
Just straight up lying with that one.
Technically maybe, but not necessarily. This is tactic that executives use all the time to force their employees to do illegal, or unethical actions, without ever telling them to.
For example, Wells Fargo executives didn’t tell their bank employees to commit fraud, but they set their sales targets such that the ONLY way to reasonably achieve them was to defraud their customers.
However, I didn’t read the actual white paper, so maybe it does explicitly say backdoors need to be built.
Hey inman grant if you ever see this, fuck you
We know your acting intentionally obtuse
Good. I fully support them. Fuck this shit
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has proposed cloud and messaging service providers should detect and remove known child abuse material and pro-terror material “where technically feasible” – as well as disrupt and deter new material of that nature.
The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.
I so love these magic wand-waving legislators. “Spy on your users and control what they do on your encrypted platform, but in a way that doesn’t break encryption or violate privacy…”
